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Ask HN: What are the biggest challenges preventing startups from hiring remote?

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Re: Ask HN: What are the biggest challenges preventing startups from hiring remote?

#51
post #21
post #8

The biggest challenge to making remote workers successful is the existing company culture. If the organization has not been built with a conscious "remote-first" mindset, new remote collaborators will inevitably be excluded from necessary communications and decisions. Making a remote worker a true part of the team requires a massive culture shift if your company does not already (successfully) do distributed work.

This takes extraordinary discipline on the part of the in-office team. Fortunately, everything that's good for a remote-first culture is also just good for communication in general. A culture of documenting everything, living in public, and over-communicating is good for any company; and burning those habits into teammates levels them up for life.

>This takes extraordinary discipline on the part of the in-office team. Fortunately, everything that's good for a remote-first culture is also just good for communication in general.

I think it's even harder for companies that have open open offices or are doing Agile. Those two things usually mean the companies are explicitly stressing in-person collaboration. In-person communication isn't a bad thing by itself, but I think that explicitly valuing in-person communication ends up making remote work harder.

Re: Ask HN: What are the biggest challenges preventing startups from hiring remote?

#53
post #11

After working remotely for over a decade for multiple companies my conclusion is the biggest issue is finding managers who grok remote working. If the person in charge doesn't know what he's doing the rest doesn't matter. Regarding your options: 1. Hardly any different than on site. 2. Not an issue at all. 3. Huh? 4. For some.

Do you have any suggestion on how to spot a "bad manager" in that regard?

My recent experience left me a bit scarred.

Re: Ask HN: What are the biggest challenges preventing startups from hiring remote?

#54

I'm the founder of a company that is ~250 people, remote first, and still fully remote. We do have an office in SF, but ~10% of our employees are present, almost no full teams are centralized, and all our processes revolve around remote work. Important to note that we're a US-founded company (this comes along later). I'm going to use this comment as a way to talk about remote hiring generally, rather than respond dir…

> First, we can't offer options/stock to contractors

Can you elaborate on what is keeping you from offering options to contractors? Sure, incentive stock options can only be given to employees but what about nonqualified stock options? They can be given to anyone.

Re: Ask HN: What are the biggest challenges preventing startups from hiring remote?

#55

I'm the founder of a company that is ~250 people, remote first, and still fully remote. We do have an office in SF, but ~10% of our employees are present, almost no full teams are centralized, and all our processes revolve around remote work. Important to note that we're a US-founded company (this comes along later). I'm going to use this comment as a way to talk about remote hiring generally, rather than respond dir…

Glad to see employers are breaking hiring norms

Re: Ask HN: What are the biggest challenges preventing startups from hiring remote?

#56
None of the above. Few engineers (or other individual contributors) have the operational maturity to work effectively remotely. Few managers have the skills to manage remote employees. Few employees have the insight and communication skills needs to work as effectively with remote colleagues as with those who are present. These issues magnify the larger and organization gets.

Re: Ask HN: What are the biggest challenges preventing startups from hiring remote?

#57
Others have mentioned this to some extent, but what I've found the most challenging is when a company tries to do both local and remote, but was not remote-first. People who are remote are de-facto second-class citizens by virtue of the fact that they aren't included in hallway conversations or casual meetings. It's incredibly hard to overcome that. Teams that started remote-first are already well-practiced in inclusion and remote rapport-building, so it's less of an issue for them. But people who have the opportunity to meet locally and build rapport locally tend to get lazy and their remote muscles atrophy over time, unless they are making a very conscious effort, or the habits have already been deeply ingrained in them over time.

I'd add that this culture-setting rolls down from management -- if they aren't setting a good example, others will falter and the remote-supporting culture will fall apart.

Things like payroll, taxes, infrastructure are all solvable today, IMO, with the right resources or tools.

Re: Ask HN: What are the biggest challenges preventing startups from hiring remote?

#58

IMO one of the least-solved problems is communication. Two areas in particular: (1) lack of a shared real whiteboard, and (2) video-call quality. These are two areas where good solutions may exist at reasonable price-points, but if so that information isn't widely known. Not sure if it fits with your business model, but it would be extremely helpful for someone to carefully evaluate the effectiveness of various techn…

A very important contributor to good call quality is good audio hardware.

Re: Ask HN: What are the biggest challenges preventing startups from hiring remote?

#59
0. bandwidth

There’s no solution as good as yelling across the room or walking past the desk. chat is a poor substitute for all the reasons everyone in this boat knows.

The best way to get this to work is like that one company did (saw it here on HN): have everyone in the company work remote for a week.

Re: Ask HN: What are the biggest challenges preventing startups from hiring remote?

#60

Others have mentioned this to some extent, but what I've found the most challenging is when a company tries to do both local and remote, but was not remote-first . People who are remote are de-facto second-class citizens by virtue of the fact that they aren't included in hallway conversations or casual meetings. It's incredibly hard to overcome that. Teams that started remote-first are already well-practiced in inclu…

Agreed. I've worked for a remote-first company, and another company where for a while I was the only remote employee. The difference has been tremendous.

I'm sure there are some special circumstances where being the only remote worker on a team works out ok, but my experience has been horrible.

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